This Ain't Your Rainbow
by bymidnightflame
Summary: "A color like a song can get stuck in your mind, and just like a song can be made and remade, becoming new again as it's sung by a different instrument, a changing timber of voice, so too can a color reform itself. Still recognized, still intimately known, even as its form shifts, a different dream landscape but still the same dream. Red is like that for Keith."


A color like a song can get stuck in your mind, and just like a song can be made and remade, becoming new again as it's sung by a different instrument, a changing timber of voice, so too can a color reform itself. Still recognized, still intimately known, even as its form shifts, a different dream landscape but still the same dream.

Red is like that for Keith.

* * *

It drips, and it drips, one round bead of red after another until there are splashes of it burning bright against the floor. Keith watches as each droplet shatters over the light blue tiles, flecks of crimson flying out in a radius around each impact point, like a star crashed to earth, scattering the remnants of the dreams it held. A dying breath. Eventually, they would dry out, turn to dust, and someone would sweep away the forgotten reminders of a life spilled with so many none the wiser.

Or maybe someone would scrub them away, bright red streaks coursing along a blue never meant to know the sin of a stain. Baby blue, he had heard them call it one day, lighter than an unclouded sky. It's the sort of blue that came out perfect and pristine.

He is not pristine.

There's dirt under his nails, and iron running hot over his lips, and he doesn't want to lick the blood away. There's something _uncivilized_ about things like that, though he doesn't quite understand the notion, only that it's unwanted.

What Keith does know is that he's eight years old, he lives in a house with people unrelated to him which somehow makes him less, and there is blood running from his nose for reasons he doesn't rightly comprehend. But, he's making a mess. Red is sinking into his shirt, and it's smeared across his hand. It's coloring the floor all wrong.

No one seems to see it though.

It drips, and it drips as the world continues to move around him. He rubs the back of his hand across his nose and tastes a sudden gush of copper and crimson across his tongue as lips part. They're not breaking for a sob. He doesn't cry.

Not anymore.

So, it keeps dripping, and it keeps dropping, and it still tastes a lot like life and a little like death. And Keith wonders how to make it stop. Only the world doesn't have that answer for him today.

But if there is one thing he has learned, it's that there are days you can bleed for nothing at all.

* * *

It trails across the Garrison, sweeping over floors and flashing around corners like a fox's tail, this thin red line swimming in the wake of Takashi Shirogane's steps. Some days Keith swears he can see it everywhere, running over the floors in a rivulet of scarlet, coiling around a door handle or floating in the air like the end of some half-formed dream calling him closer to home and heart. It's there, and then it's gone.

Some days, Keith thinks he's losing his mind, but the world doesn't see this. What the Garrison does see is a sixteen-year-old ace pilot, with instincts that spare him the misery of a steep learning curve and a dedication to the fine art of exploration. They see a quiet youth who studies as he should, eats and sleeps at the designated times, and hasn't found his way into the hearts of any of his classmates.

What they see is a young man side-stepping trouble like cracks in a sidewalk.

But he needs this, and by _this_ , he means a place he can convince himself he belongs, a place that has his name carved into it somewhere. One day he'll run his fingers over the letters etched with finality and know that everything he had suffered through until this point had been for this moment, this very place.

Then he meets Shiro, and red flickers at the edge of his periphery. The man has a smile that can light up the darkest reaches of space, brighter than any star Keith has mapped out in the night sky. He carries faith in him like a torch, and Keith is mesmerized by its glow. Because Shiro looks at him, right down past the ruddy mess of a past and the too-pink lines of scars Keith tries to ignore but pull tight across his heart in their quest for acknowledgment. Shiro sees beyond the rigid perfection of control Keith institutes over his life just to prove he belongs.

When Shiro comes into his life, Keith sees red at its brightest. He watches it spill across his world, this candy apple hue that shimmers and sparkles, whispering of sweetness. There are days he imagines tugging at that string, just to see if Shiro notices, to convince himself he's not alone.

He imagines pulling at it to see if that's the reason he's unraveling. Because he starts to smile, he starts to laugh, and he starts to live in a way that feels like building a home brick-by-brick. A place crafted by his own hands, of his own desires.

He starts to feel a little more human, and it brings a little bit of trouble with it.

But Shiro laughs when he recounts his tales of Iverson's office, and Keith learns that trouble doesn't have to bury you six-feet-under.

* * *

It aches. Aches and aches and aches, but Keith can't hear anything beyond the roar of fire in his head. It's painting his mind a red that lives and breathes and consumes so much of itself that it starts pulling in oranges and whites just to feed its rampage. Emotions dance within its flames, and Keith thinks he wants it all to burn right down to the ground, taking him right along with it.

But the world is silent around him. It has no words of consolation, no sutures to bind up his bleeding heart. The world only looks on with a doleful gaze and watches as a soul starts to crumble.

Keith stumbles over his next breath.

Breathing isn't supposed to hurt. It's not supposed to take effort, but it does. He can see his chest heaving in the mirror, the part of his lips as the air is sucked in and slices its way down his throat. Living isn't supposed to feel like dying.

But it does.

Keith doesn't see the trail of red across the Garrison anymore. It's been replaced by this charred sienna that flakes off the walls like blood splatter left too long. A crime scene forgotten with the crime swept under the rug. He hasn't forgotten though, and he doesn't think he ever will. You don't forget the empty that a lack of answers leaves behind, just like you don't forget the lies that spring to life in its wake just to give the illusion of an explanation.

So, it aches, and it aches. Keith finally looks down at his hands. His fingers grip tight over the rim of his sink, but he can still see the way they tremble against the white of its basin, the quiet aftershocks of a heart's demise. Pink glows bright around purple and blue, his knuckles stained with bruises haloed by burgeoning inflammation. Every hit against the wall had hurt, but it hadn't broken skin.

He doesn't bleed. His skin still burns, however, just as his thoughts go up in smoke. The person looking back at him from the mirror isn't him.

It's a lost cause.

And it's then that Keith realizes hope is like a snare around a hare's foot, and as his heart beats frantic and the enormity of the world collapses over him, he knows that red can burn itself down, as bitter and deep as Syrah.

* * *

It's one of the brightest things Keith has ever seen, this solar flare red flowing over crisp lines and a universe's hope. The Red Lion is also the biggest thing Keith has ever laid his eyes on, or at least the largest thing that he has gotten to call his own. As much as it is truly his, for what is a human life in the grand scheme of time and alien warcraft.

Even a human life infused with a touch of alien itself.

Not everything lasts forever though. Keith knows this much, just as he knows his heart beats, and he's survived its death and rebirth time and time again. He sees red everywhere now - wrapped thin and scarlet around Shiro's figure, in the blood he's spilled over countless battlefields, glowing warm as flame as he sits in his Lion's cockpit.

He hears it in the roar of his voice as he fights, again and again, this vivid crimson that declares he has a life to make his own. A belief that rages against the fear that dwells too deep to be carved out.

Keith wants to believe.

Because red is life.

It's the very reminder that for every wound, every heartache, every failure, he has stood up again and again. He has been razed to the ground and pulled from the ashes, the breath painful in his lungs and the thunder of his heartbeat all testament to his resilience.

Red pulses and paints and stains. It draws Keith towards the future, fingers tugging bit by bit on a seemingly endless thread, tied to the best bit of hope he has ever known. It sings to him of his past, a pool dark and deep, surface rippling as memories break through its skin. Red pulls him from the brink, the war machine that tries to save him from himself.

He lets his hand drift over his Lion's chest, tracing the various marks etched into its armor. One divot after the other, like a soldier's Braille with Keith reading every battle they had known. Every scar is a story, each one proof of the life they fought for despite staggering odds and insecurities.

If there is one thing his Lion has taught him, it's that there is weight to his soul and fire in his veins, and not everything that burns has to do so at the cost of something greater.

* * *

It sits heavy in his hands. The first time Keith hears black, it's thrust into his grasp in the shape of a helmet that isn't his and never will be. He doesn't even know if he's looking at it clearly because it seems too large and the colors too dull.

They're muted, muffled. Black is buzzing in his ears like a radio station that refuses to be picked up, so it crackles and grates against his hearing, with garbled voices cutting in only to be drowned in the static of 'no reception.' It's making his head pound.

Black used to be brilliant, this glimmering darkness that showcased starlight in all its dream-spinning glory. Sleek as lacquered onyx, black had this depth to it that promised to engulf you whole. Keith imagined it was how worlds were made, sinking into nothing and then watching as pinpricks of life unfurled, one after the other. It was powerful.

But staring at it now within his hands, he sees only the emptiness of it all. Black is the space where someone else should have been.

So, he closes his eyes and lets another sort of black consume him. This one is lightweight and soundless. It's a blank canvas, a night without stars. It's a space where anything can happen.

It's the place red sparks brightest, and when he catches it, that flash of vermilion streaking across the void, Keith knows that not everything has ended.

He only has to reach out.


End file.
